Going back more than a century, it is the tradition of Cambridge Histories to provide synthetic and authoritative surveys of the history of various parts of the world. Their primary concern is to produce broad essays that cover a given field of history at any given point and that serve as a starting point for those who need to gain access to the established historical scholarship on a given country or field of inquiry. This volume in the history of South Africa seeks to maintain this approach. It represents a culmination of several decades of scholarship on the history of South Africa in the twentieth century, above all, that produced by so-called radical or revisionist historians and their successors since about 1970. In this period, South Africa and its past turned from being an international historiographical backwater into what was, at least temporarily, one of the most dynamic and innovative fields of African historical scholarship. That said, producing a synthesis of the present kind has offered particular scholarly challenges. In this introduction, we try to examine what those challenges represent and how this volume attempts to meet them, if not necessarily to resolve them.

How did the people most affected by apartheid respond to the implementation of government measures between 1949 and the early 1970s? What informed people's opposition, silences and acquiescence at different moments across the country? In seeking to provide an answer to these questions, this chapter constructs an archive. It begins by mapping out a decade of mass protest against the first wave of apartheid laws. Then it goes some way toward explaining the quiescence that followed the banning of African nationalist organisations in 1960 and understanding the burden of coping with the intensified apartheid controls that followed. Thereafter, it identifies some of the ambivalence in responses to the various stages of Bantustan (homeland self-government) creation in the 1960s and charts the emergence of the Black Consciousness Movement in the early 1970s.